An Ealing Resident with his camera ... here's what I'm doing - if you want to commission, buy or use any pictures let me know..

Wednesday, April 24, 2013

Do TV channels have a future? and idea #105 is deterrence

On the day that Discovery's TLC arrives a women-centric TV channel on Sky's UK platform I went to a rather good (and timely) London centre Royal Television Society (RTS) meeting which asked the question Do TV channels have a future? (by the way TLC used to be The Learning Channel - but that was some time back).

Anyway back to the panel discussion on TV, panel was made up of:

Heather Killen, Chair & CEO, Horse and Country TV (broadly believing that linear TV channels have a future even those like hers which are somewhat niche and are at the mercy of the mighty SKY).

Alan Griffiths, CEO, World Media Rights who rather worryingly works with the abrasive Andrew Neil and seems to have got some similar traits to him (his view that it doesn't matter as WMG have a model which will succeed whatever the TV environment).

Nigel Walley, MD of media consultancy Decipher a new Media pundit who has got into TV and gone native and reckons that linear TV still has a lot going for it.

and the session was chaired by Chair: Neil Midgley of ye olde Daily Telegraph.

There were (as you'd expect) some thoughts around what should be considered a TV channel - most thought that Google calling YouTube channels was pretty inaccurate.

General consensus was that standard TV still has quite a bit of mileage in it ands this had been demonstrated (to many peoples surprise) by the rebirth of ITV with such fair as Downtown, Mr Selfridge Broadchurch and of course the ratings juggernaut that is The X factor.

Loads of people watch Live TV (even the adverts) and we shouldn't judge 'normal' people as being like the atypical and strange RTS crowd.

Although most households have only enough brain-space for a subset of what's available this tends to include the main 5 along with several of the spin off channels and perhaps an esoteric one or two.

Vince Cerf (web visionary apparently) may have got it a bit wrong when he said TV was dead (in 2007) but it might be (perhaps) in terminal decline (although if it continues to adapt it could take a long time to actually die).

EPGs are significant and with the arrival of HTML5 on some platforms (Freesat anyway) it could be that the layout and appearance might start evolving a bit more quickly.

Big Idea 105 is deterrence

Deterrence follows on nicely from violence (or perhaps should go before?) and means more or less (on a small scale that approach is that people will be deterred from the commission of crimes by the awareness that they will be apprehended and punished, the world also took on a meaning at nation level.